Sunday, June 28, 2015

Book Review - "The Hours" by Michael Cunningham

Our
lives are made up of years, of days, of hours. What happens around us on one
particular day can make us take a blind, or even desperate, leap forward, or it
can force us to look at life with patient gratitude. Each one of us would make
different choices, according to our own personal system of values and beliefs,
our sense of reasoning, our temperament and most importantly, our state of mind
at the final hours of that particular day.

With
lyrical prose, the author knits and weaves the events of one particular day in
the lives of three women living in separate spaces and times. One of them is
Virginia Woolf, who is recovering from her mental illness in a London suburb in
1923, while the other two are fictional variants of the leading character of
her novel Mrs. Dalloway, one a modern-day
bisexual (Clarissa Vaughan) living in New York in the late 90s and the other a
bored suburban housewife (Laura Brown) living in post-WWII Los Angeles. The
decision each of them makes at the end of their particular day has
repercussions in their individual life.

I
found this passage deeply touching:

“There’s
just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against
all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever
imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these
hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult.
Still we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.”